Earth systems: Model human adaptation to climate change

Abstract

We can no longer ignore feedbacks between global warming and how people respond, say Paul I. Palmer and Matthew J. Smith.to understand how people respond to their environment. But omitting human behaviour is like designing a bridge without accounting for traffic. DECISIONS, DECISIONSThere are two main scientific challenges to modelling socio-economic responses to climate change. The first is describing how humans make decisions. The second is describing the relationships between humans and the physical and biophysical components of the Earth system. on ambitious green-energy-production and sustainability targets, societies will be different in a warmer world. People will move to places that are richer in resources, or stay where they are and be pushed further into poverty. Population growth, urbanization, migration 2 and conflict 3 will compound reactions to global temperature rises.To understand how events might unfold and what kinds of responses will be most effective, Earth-system models need to capture human-climate dynamics. It will be an enormous challenge: we are only beginning C urrent models of Earth's climate capture physical and biophysical processes. But the planet has entered a new state: humans are adapting to, as well as causing, environmental changes. This major feedback must be modelled. Projections of the future climate based on simple economic narratives 1 -from cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions to unmitigated growth -are unrealistic.Faced with droughts and rising sea levels, people alter their behaviour. Even if global climate policy is effective, and nations deliver Residents in the flood-prone district of Kurigram, Bangladesh, move a community mosque to safer ground.

Reply to 'Strategies for changing the intellectual climate' and 'Power in climate change research'

“…We concur with Lahsen et al (1) there are other (perhaps better) examples than we chose to illustrate the tendency of global change scientists to presume a 'single, seamless concept of integrated knowledge' is realizable and desirable. Paul Palmer and Matthew Smith provide a recent one in Nature (2). We apologise if we misrepresented their article (3), and applaud their most recent efforts to detail how anthropology can help us better understand climate change (4).…”

An empirical model of the Baltic Sea reveals the importance of social dynamics for ecological regime shifts

“…Numerous studies, however, have shown that understanding individual and collective human behavior is also critical for managing natural resources (11,12) such as marine ecosystems (13,14). Socialecological system research responds to the need to incorporate humans as part of ecosystems by treating natural resource use as arising from linked systems of humans and nature, so-called social-ecological systems.…”

Detecting climate adaptation with mobile network data in Bangladesh: anomalies in communication, mobility and consumption patterns during cyclone Mahasen

“…To understand the impacts of climate change on human society it is imperative to measure anomalous behavioral responses as they coincide with hazards at the common spatiotemporal scales in which they occur (Palmer and Smith 2014). This is especially crucial where people are dependent on stable environmental conditions for livelihoods, and where both climate change and the burden of adaptation threaten human security and development (Adger et al 2014;Field et al 2014).…”

“…Mobile operator data are updated in close to real-time and have a vast geographic reach. The data generated from mobile operators enable measurement of some characteristics of social networks, migration, and patterns of household economic behavior at a previously unprecedented scale (Bagrow et al 2011;Palmer and Smith 2014;Zolli 2012). Operator data has been used during relief operations after the Haiti 2010 earthquake (Bengtsson et al 2011;Lu et al 2012) and cholera outbreaks (Bengtsson et al 2015) and the Nepal 2015 earthquake (Wilson et al 2016), making them a very promising proxy indicator for measuring impacts of climate change, and weather extremes.…”

“…This is especially crucial where people are dependent on stable environmental conditions for livelihoods, and where both climate change and the burden of adaptation threaten human security and development (Adger et al 2014;Field et al 2014). Methodologies that focus on large-scale spatial indicators of both human behavioral and environmental change, and make use of temporally adjusted longitudinal data are required to establish baselines and link short-term responses and long-term outcomes (Palmer and Smith 2014).…”